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Except that IA is a non profit with a specific set of goals. Not only that but by the very nature of said goals (amongst others, preservation and archival of knowledge), they have to be even more prudent and have stability as one of their most important goals imo. Like, every goal they have becomes completely impossible to achieve without a very stable, long term outlook. "Hitting and missing" is usually fine, but it's an attitude that is more reminiscent of wallstreetbets than a serious knowledge repository that aims to preserve everything they can for at least a few generations.

To push the wallstreetbets analogy further, a hedge fund that bets on something risky and loses big is fine. But you don't just "hit and miss" at a large scale when you are in charge of trillions in retirement/pension funds. It just should not be part of the thought process in the first place, it's the completely wrong mindset.

Not that there's no room for activism , but it should be delegated to someone else or by supporting another group or organization that could take the fight and have much less to lose.




The Internet Archive should probably have, granting access to the data in the archive, as a core goal and calling that activism is bizarre to me.


I don't think it's quite that simple.

I can't just scrape nytimes.com and re-host it on my own website legally - that's clear copyright infringement. Google news quoting article excerpts was legally controversial, as was their book search function, and their archive option.

I always assumed website owners were just sorta turning a blind eye to archive.org because (a) it's slow and (b) it doesn't get indexed in google


Right but thats not whats happening here.

IA is physically holding a physical copy of the book, and then on a 1 at a time basis, allowing digital access to that physical book.

It would be like, purchasing a copy of the new york times, scanning it, and letting people online read it one at a time. Which would be perfectly legal except for the scanning and online. It paints the law as insane, not IA as flagrant copying.


I'm very happy about this decision about CDL and I'm glad that the IA got smacked for being so obnoxious and anti-artist. But I'm also willing to turn a blind eye to the archive and the way back machine because they're useful and not really competition.




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